Welcome to the aviary. Here you will find most of the varieties of exotics you
have come to admire and worship and perhaps even frequent. It is true that
none is available in the usual senses or non-, ringed by and ringing with
knowledge and use, but this should in no way diminish your visit. Your visit
can be rich, can "pull wherewithal from negation," can engender effusions,
ablations and drainage, can pop. It can be something you describe, later, in
words--"The birdsphere surrounded me fully, there was no space for breathing, I
clutched"--or in dark little lines--say, a drawing of one of the features.
(For non-obvious subjects see index.)

At the beginning[**] you will find a display,
demonstration, and discussion of flight, with reference to the drug, marijuana,
which is used here not so much for its effects, which are often annoying to
both user and friends, as for its conceptually alliterative properties. It
stands for LSD, cults, Plato well grasped, and all other scourges of America's
youth's parents' mindblowingly dopey instructions to America's youth, often
mistaken for America's youth itself. In one of those psycho-physical
metonymies reputed more common in biblical times, the pot plant is used to make
rope, and burning it in its unravelled form in one's lungs or nearby helps burn
tethers to inherited lemons of thinking, at least in one's teens (later it just
makes one smarter or stupider). Each tether torched, the artery it bogglingly
still is for others can, for one's entertainment and progress, be riddled and
pickled and served up in dizzying flourishes of once well-woven errors. (This
is often mistaken for cruelty.)'

In the second part is the story of life after rote on a different road,
tether hemp frayed and burnt, worry defrayed, with curtseys and scrapings to
certain completely certain ideas in complete disrepute, and salutes to the
forms of living that depart from those commonly catalogued as fulfilling the
wishes of numina best. None is endorsed, some are proved vital, many are
licked up and down.

These first two parts outline the whole of this world--life hindered and not,
hinged and not. The third deals with issues of self and its mysteries, and in
the last are more potshots at arteries, suddenly whole again forms of
imprisonment, not torched or melted at all.

If these four prefab chunks don't do it for you, several additional sections,
pamphlets, proofs, manifestos and tracts can be formed by reading the index for
topics with three or more entries, or by adjoining like topics. Reading the
state-name stories could be good preparation for a cross-country trip. The
stories referred to by "Androgyny, usefulness of," "Annelids," "Bug-eyes,
attractiveness of," "Cleopatra," "Fraternity boys," "Heterosexuality," and so
on could form an excellent prom-advice pamphlet. If your faith has been
flagging, read up on "Hasids," "Mists" and "Recycling."

There is guaranteed to be produced, somewhere, in one of the sections native
or composite, at least one of the chancy excesses that dreams, truth, and
flight are consigned to be made of forever (unless, of course, you're still
hoping for Lebensraum).

A brief word on history, that necessary evil. There is a history to the
birdhouse, of course, but it is far beyond the scope of our thinking, let alone
this discussion. There is also a much more manageable little history to our
interest in birds.

The head curator speaks: "Birds are quite a bit sillier even than fish. What
is sillier than a bird? Nothing. Yet birds have determined my life.

"When I was a boy of eight, I went to visit my uncle psychiatrist, whose
mynahs were the shame of the family: he was sure he had taught them to think,
or rather to tell him about it. 'When the world finds out,' he told me, 'I'll
be as famous as Darwin, anyone.' (Was Darwin anyone?) Then,
demonstration: after telling them it was my birthday, he asked them what day it
was, and they squawked out some sounds that he translated to mean that they
knew.

"Later, he sold them.

"In the early 1990s, another researcher, Irene Pepperberg, proved beyond doubt
that her parrot could think. From her office in Tucson, home of the Biosphere,
Jane Goodall's chimps, the Garbage Project, the Multiple Mirror Telescope and
Norm Austin, she declared in full view of the bird-behavior community on which
she and her family depended that her little gray bird had the cognitive
abilities of those chimps and dolphins that others had managed to befriend and
prod for their secrets just as, in the legend, the first or so white Americans
had with their subjects.

"'I am sad,' the parrot confided to her one day as she left it for a routine
medical check-up, 'and I don't wish you to leave me alone.'

"If I could, I would name this the Charlie Myran, M.D. Arearium. Or perhaps,
since he died right after Dr. Pepperberg unveiled her parrot, I would name it
the Myran-Pepperberg Construct and Archive, or the Myran-Pepperberg
Ornithopticon. But I can't, any more than Caesar could name his Rome, or
America's natives America. In any case it doesn't exist.

"Mph."

If in the course of your visit it becomes apparent that indeed, there is no
aviary here after all, take comfort, this has been studied. There is, to be
precise, a two-inch layer of inky green matter covering the ground where,
previously, the grandest living archive imaginable could always be seen. This
matter consists of near-equal proportions of all those qualities which founded
the "substantive base" of the structure--the thoughts, ideas, errors, dilemmas,
and perverse little resonances which allowed the mere object to stand. If you
scoop up a handful and sow it among your turnips, you may obtain within days a
perfectly-scaled little replica of all civilization, there in the turnips.
Don't.

In the air above the inky green matter, the sometime stuff of the birdhouse:
its cargo, now loose, yet uncertain of what to do without walls and fixtures
and curators, and therefore preserving the concept of same so adroitly that
visitors are still often misled into seeing the thing. But there is no
thing--nor, strangely, has there ever been. There are only ideas, and part of
the charm of the aviary is in its heightening of this fact through the
partialness of its masking.

There are those who consign themselves to this puddle of birdhouse for fairly
long periods, the way moonstruck medievals would crouch in the bowls of miracle
fountains till their leg-muscles started to atrophy, claiming it made all life
singular, distinctions vanishing into the black hole of each jot and tittle's
feral uniqueness along with their cramps: there are truths, these touched would
declare stretching back into shape, but not as we think of them, nor ever will.
For many, this was an issue of comfort, for others a matter of mystic something
or other, while yet others were finding something specific they had dropped at
a fairground some decades before, or would drop the next.

The alert citizen of the abstract will indeed note that truth, unlike beauty,
can't always be seen, in the usual sense. Though there is such a thing as
negative capability, it is most often while falling asleep, or being shocked
out of hiccoughs, or being conked, or whatever, that the whole picture shows up
in some form. Then one says "Yes, there is something here to wrest me from
damage," or "No, I will no longer fluster the vitriol of my dearths," or the
like, before submerging in sleep, gratefulness or unconsciousness.

Some experience this moment as lunacy or powerlessness, which is why it so
rarely occurs, but the curators call it "ideation compaction" and see it, as do
the parrots (from whom, if truth be told, they obtain their ideas and
phrasing), as a means of salvaging life from the slag (modified from the
parrots' more elegant but foggier "means of dredging the dogged," or "bogged,"
or something). (Despite differences in vocabulary arising from different
milieus, curators and birds are agreed on most things, including these
concepts, and on the goals of the aviary: loosening of strictures, effective if
muted revolt against ways of thought and vocabulary imposed by milieus,
deafening of the shapes of constraint into shapes, mere this and mere that,
rather than shapes of constraint. The parrots call the malleability of reality
that makes this possible "the flightiness of all factualness," or "the
lightness of all actualness," or something like that.)

In events, one thing will occur regardless of neighbors, and another will never
occur, all strife to its doing a lark in its eyes; by a different token, each
thing will roam to each other regardless of order, but the cause and result are
of one's own gazing, like Australia of the Australians' singing.

This minded, you needn't start anywhere in particular in your visit, any more
than history had to start with an apple, tablet, or cudgel. Nor, as through
history proper, need your motion be influenced by any arbitrary decoction of
lines such as these, or those to be birthed from exchange with the index; like
the order of living events, lines are a matter for plotters and fishermen, not
for the quick.

You should steadfastly ignore all this chatter, in fact, and randomly wander,
perhaps waylaying one of the parrots briefed to discuss, without any traces of
vanity, most any subject concerning their new cousins, the apes and the
dolphins. While the trainer is pleased to announce the parrots' near-complete
grasp of the research, cranial size prohibits presentable discourse on all
other usual subjects, and visitors attempting to ask about traffic, clothing or
other hard matters of localized interest will be asked to depart. Questions
pertaining to the absolutes of philosophy have proved surprisingly easy for
parrots even without education, and are therefore allowed, if not exactly
encouraged.

But don't get caught up with those beaked cassette tours either. Just scratch
on the walls, demote ceilings, eat floors--slobber on something, if slobbering
helps. If you find yourself rethinking what-not, don't reach for your pipe,
just go on and do it, and think also of health, boys, gadgets, malaria, grunge,
and especially that tongue depressant of knowledge, the sameness of life.